City awards $4.5M to help Austin Playhouse construct dual-theater facility

The city has selected the Austin Playhouse theater group as the latest recipient of creative space bond money, with City Council set to approve a $4.5 million award at today’s meeting. That money will allow the independent arts group to construct two theater venues with an outdoor patio, lobby, classroom and studio space and the ability to serve as an art gallery as needed.

The 17,000-square-foot facility will be constructed on a 2.8-acre parcel on Anderson Lane near U.S. Highway 183 that Austin Playhouse purchased in 2019 with money it began raising in 2011. Its leaders expect to complete a separate $3 million campaign over the next year, with plans to begin construction in late 2024 and open in late 2025.

“(It) will be transformative for us as an arts organization to have this stability that we have really never experienced. Our subscriber base over the years has been as high as 2,000. It’s obviously a lot lower than that now coming out of the pandemic, but we have this core group of really loyal, longtime supporters and a lot of new folks that are joining us,” producing artistic director Lara Haddock said of the plans for a 99-seat black box theater space and a 207-seat main stage that will be made available to a wide variety of community groups. “It’s always been part of our vision for the space that it would serve Austin Playhouse, but that we could also fill a need in the community and that it would be of use to a lot of diverse arts organizations.”

Austin Playhouse is the third and so far largest recipient of funds from the 2018 bond package that provided $12 million to help buy, construct or improve creative spaces for local arts groups. Last year, the Austin Economic Development Corporation, which is responsible for administering the funds and helping to conduct real estate transactions, announced it had awarded $400,000 to improve the Millennium Youth Entertainment Complex, with another $2 million for converting into creative space more than 7,000 square feet in the city’s Permitting and Development Center on Highland Mall Boulevard and Middle Fiskville Road.

Earlier this year, the city also announced the Hole in the Wall music venue had received $1.6 million as the first recipient of money from the separate Iconic Venue Fund.

Austin Playhouse is currently operating out of converted space in University Baptist Church on Guadalupe Street, its fourth location since opening 24 years ago.

Haddock said theater leaders were optimistic about their chances to receive funding since they first applied as part of the city’s request for proposals that opened in late 2021. That process brought in 45 applicants who collectively represented $300 million of need for space in the local arts community.

“From the get go, we felt that our project had a lot of areas of alignment with how the city wanted the funds to be used,” she said. “I love the convenience of West Campus, but parking is tough and the construction in the area is tough for some of our people. There’s also a convenience factor and a visibility factor moving to a space where 65,000 cars drive past every day. It’s a pretty great path that the city is on to be supporting these arts groups with this level of visibility.”

Haddock and AEDC staff were on hand at Monday’s Arts Commission meeting to share the details of the award that was seen as a major boost for the arts ecosystem.

“(Austin Playhouse) have a huge emphasis on affordability as well as accessibility for the Austin community, not only for our theater companies and rehearsal space and theater space, but also for patrons. So ticket prices and creating affordable shows. They do education programming with Title I schools, and a lot of really proactive work to get communities that aren’t necessarily always considered and included in those spaces up front and center,” Arts Commission Chair Celina Zisman said.

Rendering by Forge Craft Architecture + Design.

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